F5521GW WWAN install on Windows 8 CP (Lenovo X220t)

I recently upgraded from Windows 7 to the CP of Windows 8 and was surprised how well everything seemed to work. I was however having some battery life issues so decided to do a fresh install to make sure it wasn’t some driver weirdness left over from Win7.

After downloading and install drivers for all my system devices i was a bit disappointed to find that the 3G card’s (Ericsson F5521GW in my X220T) driver had installed correctly but that Windows 8 did not want to treat it as a broadband connection device. I could manually start the “WWAN configuration service” and then from a command line if I ran “netsh mbn show interface” I’d just get a message back saying “There is no Mobile Broadband interface”. Not great.

I knew the card worked fine in Windows 8 because it had functioned correctly before I did the re-install and if I installed the Lenovo access connection software I could make it connect to the internet but I wanted to uses the built in Windows 8 connection logic (MS have done some pretty cool things to support 3G connections in Windows 8). After some playing about I figured out how to install the driver correctly so thought I’d share…

Uninstall all other WWAN / mobile broadband drivers

From “uninstall programs” make sure you remove any previous broadband drivers & if needs be open Device Manager and uninstall the broadband device components. When your done you should see something like this:

Download latest drivers

Next go to the Lenovo download site and get the latest WWAN card drivers – even though these are listed as “Windows 8” compatible they aren’t quite…

Compatibility trick

Navigate to the folder where you saved the driver zip file and extract them.

Now open the “driver” subfolder and bring up the properties for “setup”

under the compatibility tab open “Change settings for all users” and set “Run this program” as “Windows 7” then apply

Now run a command prompt and navigate to the folder path for that Setup.exe file (make sure you get to the one in the “driver” subfolder, not the one in the level above!)

Now type in “setup.exe /wNOAUTOSENSING /wUSELASTKNOWNRADIOSTATE” and hit enter to start the installer

You might get the following security prompt:

Just hit “more info” and then “Run anyway”

You’ll then get a prompt for elevating the setup & click next and choose the default options unless you really want to store the files elsewhere

When it’s finished you should have the following devices listed in device manager:

Ports

F5521gw Mobile Broadband Device Management

F5521gw Mobile Broadband GPS Port

Smart card Readers

F5521gw Mobile Broadband USIM Port

USB controllers

F5521gw Mobile Broadband Device

And if you click on the “connect to network” icon you should now see your 3G provider listed..! (My connections show as limited because I was on a VPN at the time!)

That was the last of the drivers I had problems installing on Windows 8 and everything now seems fairly happy and well behaved (with no missing drivers or unknown devices). If it’s of interest I could post a guide for doing a clean install but that would mean starting over. Let you know if there’s interest below. Happy Windows 8’ing

1 comment, i had to take the “wrong” complete installation once before it works. (installed all the lenovo updates, drivers, etc. and only then removed the Mobile driver to successfully apply this solution. now 100% up and running)

Thanks!

Stefan
on December 3, 2013 at 5:11 pm

Thx a lot for this!
I really suffered a lot with tethering – running out of battery on my mobile and so on!

Thank you so much for writing up these instructions. I’ve just done a clean Windows 8.1 install on a Lenovo X220 i7 and there doesn’t appear to be any newer driver (i.e. no Win 8 version) than the one you suggest (6.5.1.5 30 Oct 2011) so I followed your guide and my WWAN seems to be working fine. So thanks very much indeed!